Posts tagged VerticalTakeoffAndLanding

If at first your unmanned aerial vehicles don't succeed... try, try again? After a series of unsuccessful tests with the Boeing X-50 Dragonfly and Groen Heliplane, the US government is once again trying to develop a high-speed, vertical takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft. DARPA just announced the...

This test-firing may not match the flame of earlier demonstrations, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted out a brief eight-second video of another setup it's testing, the "Grasshopper" reusable vertical takeoff, vertical landing rocket. While the first hop would've been shamed in any interstellar dunk...

It's not me, it's you. The US Army's dalliance with Boeing's A160 Hummingbird drone got one step closer to Splitsville after the military branch issued a stop-work order for the project. Initially scheduled to see action in Afghanistan starting this July, the chopper-drone turned plenty of heads t...

NASA can't just park up in the middle of space and rely on Robotnaut 2 for its entertainment. Actually, it probably can, but at some point the urge to explore new worlds will become too strong to resist. That's when it'll need a suborbital rocket guidance system like the GENIE ("Guidance Embedded N...

Starting in July of 2012, the United States Army will deploy three Boeing A160 Hummingbird drones to Afghanistan as part of a one-year trial program. Unlike the Predator drones already in combat, the A160 is a rotor-based aircraft capable of vertical take-offs and landings. What's more, the craft...